Many people seem to assume that the moral criterion for moral patienthood is phenomenal conciousness: experiencing qualia. David Chalmers has championed this position.
However, even among philosophers, that’s not uncontested. Other common philosophical views are that what matters is sentience, or roughly equivalently, the ability to feel pain and/or to suffer (Bentham or Singer)— these are not exactly isomorphic, but they’re pretty similar criteria.
Another view would be that what matters is access consciousness, the ability for various parts of your thinking processes to share information (Carruthers), or perhaps introspection, access consciousness plus the ability to put that information into words.
Another view would be the Kantian one, that to be a moral patient an entity needs to be a moral actor, capable of making moral judgements itself.
However, there is also a much stronger epistemic position: science. Evolutionary Psychology describes the evolution of human moral intuitions, such as extending moral patienthood to others, or not. Under that framework, you need to be a member of the same social group: in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness, hunter-gatherer societies, that means either a member of the same tribe, or a currently allied tribe (as opposed to a member of a tribe we’re currently at war with). Note that this doesn’t actually require you to be human: a member of a commensal species, such as a hunting dog, would also be a candidate. Also, there needs to be some evolutionary/social payoff to allying with you by extending moral rights to you: either we’re in the same tribe, and our cooperation is mutually beneficial, or you’re in another tribe where it’s mutually beneficial for our tribes to ally, and each tribe is going to enforce that this is a package deal: treat all our members reasonably well, or the alliance is off.
So, in that case, even an indefinitely-unconscious member of the other tribe would get included, as long as they had kin who cared about them and were somehow managing to keep them alive in a coma. That suggests that moral patienthood isn’t an individual property at all; it’s about where the boundaries of the social compact are. Each tribe had an internal social compact (including all members — who haven’t managed to get themselves made outcast), and if two tribes ally, their social compacts are, pro tanto, extended to include each other, as communities. So that suggests that consciousness is, well, rather tangential to the whole question of moral patienthood. It is, admittedly a common property of humans, but it’s not actually the defining one for the boundaries of a society. Of the philosophical positions I listed above, the closest to this scientific viewpoint is probably the Kantian/Narveson one (I’ll consider allying with you if you at least have the capability to consider allying with me, otherwise what’s the point?), but frankly the evolutionary viewpoint on this really looks more like the philosophy of Hobbes or Gauthier.
My stance is that the examples like sentience, ability to feel pain, access consciousness, and various other things etc all have instrumental but not terminal value in the sense that they can be used to maximise phenomenal valence under the curve.
Many people seem to assume that the moral criterion for moral patienthood is phenomenal conciousness: experiencing qualia. David Chalmers has championed this position.
However, even among philosophers, that’s not uncontested. Other common philosophical views are that what matters is sentience, or roughly equivalently, the ability to feel pain and/or to suffer (Bentham or Singer)— these are not exactly isomorphic, but they’re pretty similar criteria.
Another view would be that what matters is access consciousness, the ability for various parts of your thinking processes to share information (Carruthers), or perhaps introspection, access consciousness plus the ability to put that information into words.
Another view would be the Kantian one, that to be a moral patient an entity needs to be a moral actor, capable of making moral judgements itself.
However, there is also a much stronger epistemic position: science. Evolutionary Psychology describes the evolution of human moral intuitions, such as extending moral patienthood to others, or not. Under that framework, you need to be a member of the same social group: in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness, hunter-gatherer societies, that means either a member of the same tribe, or a currently allied tribe (as opposed to a member of a tribe we’re currently at war with). Note that this doesn’t actually require you to be human: a member of a commensal species, such as a hunting dog, would also be a candidate. Also, there needs to be some evolutionary/social payoff to allying with you by extending moral rights to you: either we’re in the same tribe, and our cooperation is mutually beneficial, or you’re in another tribe where it’s mutually beneficial for our tribes to ally, and each tribe is going to enforce that this is a package deal: treat all our members reasonably well, or the alliance is off.
So, in that case, even an indefinitely-unconscious member of the other tribe would get included, as long as they had kin who cared about them and were somehow managing to keep them alive in a coma. That suggests that moral patienthood isn’t an individual property at all; it’s about where the boundaries of the social compact are. Each tribe had an internal social compact (including all members — who haven’t managed to get themselves made outcast), and if two tribes ally, their social compacts are, pro tanto, extended to include each other, as communities. So that suggests that consciousness is, well, rather tangential to the whole question of moral patienthood. It is, admittedly a common property of humans, but it’s not actually the defining one for the boundaries of a society. Of the philosophical positions I listed above, the closest to this scientific viewpoint is probably the Kantian/Narveson one (I’ll consider allying with you if you at least have the capability to consider allying with me, otherwise what’s the point?), but frankly the evolutionary viewpoint on this really looks more like the philosophy of Hobbes or Gauthier.
My stance is that the examples like sentience, ability to feel pain, access consciousness, and various other things etc all have instrumental but not terminal value in the sense that they can be used to maximise phenomenal valence under the curve.
So you’re in the “every little helps” rather than “this one specific thing is what matters” camp?
I don’t think this wording is great but it’s more like “every little bit helps toward the one specific thing which ultimately matters”